GM plans to put self-driving cars to work in cities in 2019

GM plans to get its autonomous cars driving commercially around cities by 2019. That's according to a presentation posted on the automaker's website, which stated that at its current rate, GM expects "commercial launch at scale" to happen after next year.

That includes commercial use for both item delivery and passenger carrying. The latter could refer to the autonomous taxi fleet of Bolt EVs GM plans to launch in 2018, which its preparing for with additional testing. The could offer its own service as well, given how much things have cooled between GM's autonomous Cruise division and Lyft.) Whatever rollout the automaker has planned for 2019, it probably isn't referring to a small program. This week, Cruise CEO Kyle Vogt said they will likely only launch when they're ready for a full-scale deployment.